Comissioned text for and...and...and... Exhibition Catalogue, Sylvester Works Sheffield, 2007. Curated by Robert Lye
An Illegible Text.
The cranes that protrude awkwardly in-between buildings; primary coloured stationary that interrupts the horizon and directs the eye to ascend with them to their apex, piercing the sky where they come to settle comfortably, outstretched, in their place in the canopy; it is from here that I write, with privileged vantage from their topmost points. Rising from cordoned off (no longer) public spaces, designated areas for acts of convivial public exchange - perhaps quick lunches, long periods of vacant contemplation, a crafty teenage cigarette; or from demolition sites haunted by the spectre of their past smoky aired industrial or utopian aspirations, these lofty giants of construction stand in apologetic grandeur above the concrete stacks and hammerings of immediate regeneration at their base. They are temporarily located yet endlessly present and never obsolete in the modern city.
The panoramic view of the city centre shows the drag or rush of the streets; the smooth cut concrete surface appeal of new urban regeneration projects and inner-city living, and the lingering presence of their failed predecessors, disillusioned ghost-like icons of modernist ideology.
The city has always eluded definition; it is the nucleus of everyday lived space , a space of fantasy, and a context against which the experience of the rural is placed. From an aerial view, the city below appears as a conceptualised space in the self-perpetuating condition of progress (progress which, in being satisfied, denies its own existence), a diagram by which planned spatial relations are enacted; the city becomes an image.
From this privileged position I am detached from the actualities of lived experience in the built environment, which occur beneath the threshold at which visibility begins.
For Michel de Certeau, this is the metaphorical distanced position of those within the economic system of the city who design and define the space and its uses towards a structure centred on theoretical and ideological vision, ultimately to facilitate efficient capital growth. The city seen as a plan genericizes the movements of its inhabitants and variants of the everyday, guiding their experiences of the spaces they inhabit. To take u de Certeau’s proposal of the city as a text, these imposed pre-definitions of city life can then be equated as means’ enabling legibility. In a readable city, the complex and interweaving narratives of both collective and individual movements through physical space are separated and punctuated by prescribed methods of encountering these spaces, separating the individual from their encounters and denying a personal relation to the space. Artist Nayan Kulkarni places this in perspective, ‘If you have a legible city – a city you can’t get lost in – you have a controlled city.’
Physical disorientation or a sense of non-belonging; where becoming lost is inferred, with it is most often the notion of origin and destination. Everyday movements are punctuated by places, in which the city dweller has reason to be, and therefore feels they belong. These identifications of, and with, place make sense of individuals’ positions within the city and the routines of daily life, alleviating the blindness of city life amongst the crowds or alone on a deserted side street, defining the ways in which daily encounters are understood. In a wider sense perhaps, these place bound identities necessary in assuaging anxiety at the unknowable and bewilderingly vast network of spatial and social structures and relations that comprise the individual’s understanding of the world, offering a sense of place within it. Through identifying place, we identify ourselves in relation to it, and to the other. Place creates identity, yet equally it is through this need for identification that place is in turn created, and therefore in being lost or displaced we are facing anxiety at a misidentification with the self.
The notion of a journey, of the inner-city, or of a destination, immediately insinuates a walk, which has been a preoccupation for successive artists, writers, geographers, theorists and social activists when negotiating the influence of the metropolis on evolving human state. Walking has, for some, provided the literal realisation of their aims in subverting the enactment of daily life. Social and spatial relations not only affect one another but produce one another, and therefore intervention into one possibly provides a key to significantly changing, if not revolutionising the other.
I look away from the city below and the notes on my desk, turning towards window to my left to see the dark purple rooftops and the moon, a reflection of my light bulb. Down the hill my neighbour sits, part of a community without geographic ties, sending instant messages to its distant members whilst dreaming of an unknown setting, relocating himself again with Google earth. Through a forest I visited regularly in the past, certain paths and bicycle routes were clear through the trees, which were marked with black rings towards the bottom of their trunks to protect them in some way. The veteran Major Oak; a dying organism embodying time beyond my comprehension. I read an article about that same place last week as I travelled on a train in the dark, looking out of the window to see the passenger sat on the opposite seat.
Within a utopian ideology in which revolutionised social relations determine spatial form and vice versa, the inherent problems lie in the inevitable authoritarianism of the agenda by which this is brought about. To consider the extremes of Marxism and capitalism as ideals to adopt in totality is problematic and difficult to swallow for most in the contemporary city. Capital gain is always placed in conflict with fulfilling relations to the surroundings, yet the economic reasons for the city ever coming into existence can’t be ignored. Such extremes allude to clearly defined boundaries and outcomes, and to a conclusive ‘big picture.’
Whilst physical re-appropriations of urban space still play a role and the everyday has become fundamental context and medium in many cultural practices, the literal incarnation of the journey as a walk is not the only journey or narrative implied in presenting the city as an ever changing web of interlinking narratives. Walking activates the city, writes the space, and through it the walker physically engages with their environment, but as they move they also encounter the equally influential space of fantasy, moving simultaneously through the narratives of the imagination. In the city, divergent routes are walked as inhabitants are seated at their desk, imaginary strangers are greeted, accounts of remembered dreams are shared and locations observed in advertisements to return as anecdote or déjà vu. The mental life of the city can be important in considering issues of the local and the global in the forming of identity, including the positioning of identity in relation to points in time, history and its unknowable interlinking details.
Through these literal, metaphorical and remembered journeys, both real and imaginary, the text of the city is written. The perception of multiple destinations create fragmentation and alleviate the anxiety of the inconclusive narrative; the natural process of catharsis. Instead of attempting to alter the structure of urban lived space to counter this, the influence of the mental life of the city can be considered, that of memory fear and imagination in the conception of the city and of identity. This then offers perhaps a rewriting of the city in a way which encourages, not the need to be constantly wandering, lost, but an examination of the sense of right or wrong attributed to its specific places, and the need for destinations and secure chronologies. If place is considered a pacifying and binding concept, then subsequently the significance of the right place can be reconsidered in the defining of the self.
This regenerative process suggests a constant redefinition of the city, instilled from the ‘bottom up’ through the perceptions and actions of its inhabitants. The place bound definition of the city’s identities are reconsidered, yet differences are not erased to become homogenised or legible; this process sustains relations. Suggested is an ever-shifting state by which the inhabitant simultaneously belongs and doesn’t belong, is located and dislocated; the identities of the city and the self are dynamic and intertwined. This state is produced by the inhabitants; a state of flux by which the individual is reconnected to the space, produces the city, and to be lost comes to signify a gain.
Endnotes (please contact for formatted version.)
In reference to Lefebvre’s definition of space as conceived, perceived and lived, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1991.
de Certeau comes to this realisation from his own elevated physical position, as he beholds a deceptively ‘full view’ of New York City. The panorama city, he explains, is ‘a “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.’ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall, London: University of California Press 1988. p. 92.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 92..
Nayan Kulkarni, in Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Emma Cocker (eds.) Transmission: Speaking and Listening, Volume 5, Sheffield: Site Gallery 2006. p 69.
By means of a sample of texts; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1999, Anna Best Occasional Sights: A London Guidebook of Missed Opportunities and Things that Aren't Always There, London: The Photographers Gallery 2003, Guy Debord, ‘Theory of Derive’ [1958], in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets 1995, Claire Doherty, (ed.) Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, London: Black Dog 2004, Georg Simmel, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' [1903], in Phillip Kasinitz (ed.), Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of our Times, Basingstoke: Macmillan., Wrights and Sites, 'A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: Dealing with the City', in Everyday Walking Culture: The Sixth International Conference on Walking in the 21st Century, 22-23 September, Zürich, in Performance Research, Issue 11.2, London: Routledge 2005.
The centralist and utopian architectural ideals of the Situationists were to be brought about through altered methods of urban navigation, in view of humans’ own actions functioning to eradicate detachment from their everyday surroundings, which had become reduced to an image of which people were spectators, see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black and Red 1983.
David Harvey’s theory identifies the self, the community, the institution, the built environment, and the principles of human action among the eight fronts on which political interventions can be made. See David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press 2000, and Steve Pile, Real Cities, London: Sage Publications Ltd. 2005.
Developed in Miwon Kwon, From One Place to Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2004.
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